No global warming for 17 years 8 months

Times are not easy for true-believers just now. The RSS satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly for March, just in, shows no global warming at all for 17 years 8 months. This remarkable 212-month period, enduring from August 1996 to March 2014, represents half of the entire 423-month satellite record since it began in January 1979.

Figure 1. The remarkable 212-month absence of global warming, notwithstanding a record rate of increase in CO2 concentration. The Pause – the least-squares trend on the data for the past 17 years 8 months – now extends to just over half the entire 423-month Remote Sensing Systems satellite record since January 1979.

Yet we should not crow. A strongish el Niño – we are rather overdue for one – may well shorten the Pause quite a bit, but probably only until the subsequent la Niña a year or two later, whereupon the Pause may resume and perhaps continue embarrassingly to lengthen for a decade and more. Or so my model tells me, and that means it must be right. Right?

To appreciate the sheer magnitude of the credibility problem the modelers and their host of fawning apologists now face, we can look at the crisis faced by the paid propaganda merchants at “Skeptical” “Science”. They are proud of their tacky little alarmo-ticker, which – so they assert – demonstrates how many “Hiroshima bombs” of global-warming energy have been trapped in the atmosphere since – for some reason – 1998.

The labeling of that useless widget with the word “Hiroshima” is a downright offensive and insulting exploitation of the death and acute suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant citizens of Japan in one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare.

It is all of a piece with the characterization of scientific skeptics as “climate deniers”, a hate-speech term that maliciously invites comparison with the most disgraceful atrocity in the history of warfare – the slaughter of almost six million innocent, non-combatant citizens of Europe by Hitler’s goons.

For this reason, let us talk no more of “Hiroshima bombs”. Let as talk, as followers of the scientific method should, of the radiant energy theoretically retained in the atmosphere by the influence of Man on the climate – and not just since 1998 but since the Pause began in August 1996.

CO2 concentration in 1996 was about 363 ppmv. Now it is more like 398. We may assume either that temperature feedbacks are net-zero or that, over so short a timescale as 17 years 7 months, they will not have had much opportunity to operate.

In that event, using the IPCC’s method, the additional radiant energy retained in the atmosphere thanks to CO2 is 5.35 times the logarithm of the proportionate CO2 concentration change in Watts per square meter, divided by the fraction of total anthropogenic forcing represented by CO2, which the IPCC reckons at 70%. That gives 0.704 Watts per square meter.

All of this is mainstream IPCC climatology. No ifs or buts. That, at minimum, is the quantum of anthropogenic radiative forcing that should have warmed the system since September 1996 – if the IPCC were right. According to NASA the volumetric mean radius of the Earth is 6371 km. Surface area, then, is around 510 Tm^2. So the additional energy flux in the Earth-atmosphere system since the Pause began is close to 360 TW. That’s a lotta Watts.

In a zero-feedback regime the instantaneous and equilibrium warmings are equal. By the IPCC’s own method, then, the central estimate of the global warming that should have occurred since September 1996 is 0.313 x 0.704. That works out at 0.22 Cº. But the observed, real-world outturn is 0.00 Cº. So, where on Earth did all those terawatts go? RSS have been working on that. This is what they report [with comments from me in square brackets]:

“Over the past decade, we have been collaborating with Ben Santer at LLNL (along with numerous other investigators) to compare our tropospheric results with the predictions of climate models. [Three cheers: they’re doing some good, old-fashioned science, checking the models’ output rather than just believing it].

“Our results can be summarized as follows:

“Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly. The global average temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.13 Kelvin (0.23 Fº) per decade. [Actually, make that closer to 0.12 K/decade: the Pause is long enough to slow the rate a little more].

“Climate models cannot explain this warming if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation. [But the warming is well within natural variability, so the inability of models to “explain” the warming without Man merely shows how bad they are at representing natural influences].

“The spatial pattern of warming is consistent with human-induced warming. See Santer et al., 2008-12, for more about the detection and attribution of human induced changes in atmospheric temperature using MSU/AMSU data. [Note the use of one of the usual suspects’ favorite weasel-phrases, “consistent with”: the spatial pattern of warming is also “consistent with” natural variability, and an honest scientist would have said so].

“But the troposphere has not warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict. [Their emphasis. Hurrah! Some intellectual honesty about the Pause at last].

“To illustrate this last problem, we show several plots below. Each of these plots has a time series of TLT temperature anomalies using a reference period of 1979-2008.

“In each plot, the thick black line is the measured data from RSS V3.3 MSU/AMSU temperatures. The yellow band shows the 5% to 95% envelope for the results of 33 CMIP5 [Climate Model Inter-comparison Project, version 5] model simulations (19 different models, many with multiple realizations) that are intended to simulate Earth’s climate over the 20th century.

“The mean value of each time series average from 1979-1984 is set to zero so the changes over time can be more easily seen.

“For the period before 2005, the models were forced with historical values of greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols, and solar output. After 2005, estimated projections of these forcings were used. If the models, as a whole, were doing an acceptable job of simulating the past, then the observations would mostly lie within the yellow band.

“For the first two plots, (Fig. 2 and Fig 3), showing global averages and tropical averages, this is not the case. Only for the far northern latitudes, as shown in Fig. 4, are the observations within the range of model predictions.

“Figure 2. Global (80S-80N) mean TLT [tropical lower-troposphere] anomaly as a function of time. After 1998, the observations are likely to be below the simulated values, indicating that the simulation as a whole are predicting too much warming. [Honesty again].

“Figure 3. Tropical (30S-30N) mean TLT anomaly as a function of time. Again, after 1998, the observations are likely to be below the simulated values, indicating that the simulation as a whole are predicting too much warming. [Yet more honesty].

“Figure 4. Northern Polar (55N-80N) mean TLT anomaly as a function of time. For this latitude band, the observations remain within the model envelope. [But latterly on the low side].

“The reasons for the discrepancy between the predicted and observed warming rate are currently under investigation by a number of research groups. Possible reasons include increased oceanic circulation leading to increased subduction of heat into the ocean, higher than normal levels of stratospheric aerosols due to volcanoes during the past decade, incorrect ozone levels used as input to the models, lower than expected solar output during the last few years, or poorly modeled cloud feedback effects. It is possible (or even likely) that a combination of these candidate causes is responsible.”

Just a little honesty there, too. Just one off-the-cuff suggestion (volcanoes, which have not been particularly active globally in the past decade), but no fewer than three possible modeling errors are suggested.

At last, at long last, the Pause is having its effect. The modelers, and those – such as the IPCC – who have until recently placed a naïve and complete faith in them to which no mathematician would have subscribed for an instant unless he had been very well paid to do so, are beginning, just beginning, to wake up and smell the coffee. Will somebody tell the politicians before they squander any more of your money and mine?

Your lordship writes “Will somebody tell the politicians before they squander any more of your money and mine?”
Just over a month ago, I, once again, contacted my MP, David McGuinty, this time by written letter. He has very kindly forwarded my letter to our Minister of the Environment, and requested a response. That was on March 12th 2014. The protocol is that the Minister must send a reply, though I do not know what sort of time frame is involved. Should I expect a reply in 2, 3, 6 or even 12 months? I don’t know. I hope to find out in the near future.

I’m English, not American, but war is war. It matters not one jot whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, it was a means to an end. Hindsight is a wonderous thing, and makes people who might otherwise appear intelligent, say something stupid. But try to think back to THAT time. The Japanese would have fought on for years, for every yard of land, such was their stupendous belief in their little world. Those two bombs cost many Japanese lives, but saved countless American ones. Given ALL that we know, and given the time and opportunity again, it was STILL the right thing to do, and (on a different continent) Bomber Harris was still correct in every thing he did – including Dresden. Mr Monckton, you may consider retraction of a particular piece of your writing.

The UN IPCC AR5 WGII final climate report has been released. This UN WGII report attempts to evaluate various global risks associated with future climate change. The evaluation process utilized in the WGII report relies upon global temperature projections obtained from low and high CO2 emissions climate model scenarios that were developed and addressed in the UN IPCC AR5 WGI report which was released last year.

In the UN WGI AR5 report the climate models were shown to exaggerate and overstate projected increases in global temperatures based on CO2 levels assumed present in the atmosphere compared to actual observed global temperatures. This is extremely important given that the WGII report uses these exaggerated climate model higher global temperature projection scenarios to assess climate risks associated with increasing global CO2 levels.

Thus the WGII report analysis overstates risks for given levels of atmospheric CO2 levels since as the report notes “Risks are reduced substantially under assumed scenarios with the lowest temperature projections compared to the highest temperature projections”.

The WGII report fails to mention or address that the AR5 WGI report showed that the CO2 driven temperature sensitivity of the earth based on actual global temperature observations is at the very lowest end of the low emissions climate model scenarios. This result reflects the consequence of the 15+ year long and growing global temperature pause which is never discussed in the UN WGII report.

This overriding AR5 WGI lower temperature CO2 atmospheric sensitivity result is simply concealed and ignored in the AR5 WGII final report which blithely goes on to make assessment after assessment of the impacts of increasing CO2 levels based on climate model temperature projections which have been shown to grossly exaggerate and overstate the global temperature increase impacts of atmospheric CO2 levels.

The climate model scenarios developed by the UN have other significant limitations beyond not being able to produce temperature projections that agree with measured global temperatures. These include that climate model temperature projections have no probabilities attached to their computed outcomes and that the resulting temperature projection outcomes are considered to be simply “plausible and illustrative”. Thus comparisons of climate model temperature outcomes to actually observed global temperatures is paramount to assessing whether these projections have validity.

The failure of the UN WGII report to utilize the results of the UN WGI report which showed that climate models grossly exaggerate and overstate global temperatures and then use these same flawed climate models to establish global temperature related risks associated with atmospheric CO2 levels means that the WGII claimed climate risk findings are both overstated and invalid.

In reply to Mr Wallace, the Earth’s surface area is around 510 Terameters. A Terameter is a 1 followed by 12 zeroes.

Not quite sure of the relevance of Kevin Loser’s point.

And in answer to Mr Valencia, when the UAH results become available I’ll be producing the monthly comparison between the mean of the RSS and UAH datasets, on the one hand, and the IPCC’s exaggerated predictions, on the other.

This is an interesting moment: for more than half of the satellite record, RSS shows no global warming at all.

” higher than normal levels of stratospheric aerosols due to volcanoes during the past decade, ”

Oh Please ! What’s “normal” ? in latter half of 20th c. there were three massive stratospheric eruptions and we saw marked warming. Since the have been basically sod-all. If you want to draw simplisitic conclusions, you’d have to say that the last decade has been way _below_ “normal”. The logical inference is that volcanoes cause warming, not cooling.

And that may not be a mad as it sounds. The tropics are almost fully immune to radiative forcing. When there’s a drop in coming , they just catch more of it.

Try to spot the cooling from those volcanoes. It just is not there.

Volcanoes cause warming in approximately equal measure to the direct cooling effect. They also help to compensate for extra-tropical regions. I’m writing an article on this right now.

The other thing I can show is that the volcanic forcing is actually stronger them modellers currently give it. They’ve just “adjusted” the input to the model to better fit the model which does not have strong negative feedbacks.

If you look at Lacis et al 1993 ( Hansen was a co-author ) they used a factor of 30 W/m^2 , based on proper physical science. Since they’ve down graded it fit the lack of corrective feedback in the models.

That’s the Lacis 1992 value and the current Giss value. Even the Lacis value shows the climate responsed _before_ the optical effects of Mt Pinatubo rose up. Even that value may be somewhat undervalued.

The only way this adds up is if the climate have a strong negative feedback to radiative changes.

I admire your efforts on reporting the climate, but let’s not forget “….. one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare.” brought the conflict to an end saving the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

It was after all, the Japenese who attacked Pearl Harbour without warning.

“The reasons post-hoc excuses for the discrepancy between the predicted and observed warming rate are currently under investigation being desperately clutched at by a number of research groups.”
There, fixed.

There were other options than Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The decision was made based on the belief that the emporer would not surrender without maaive loss of civilian lives. I’m with Christopher Monckton and always have been. When studying for my first physics degree one of the subjects was health physics. The only data available at that time was Japanese. We now have Chernobyl and Fukashima. I support totally the use of nuclear power for the generation of electricity.

…….that the “PAUSE” or “PLATEAU” has set in, was in 2003, for the first time (Who knowns
an earlier paper? Please step foreward!) calculated in the paper: “L.B.Klyashtorin, A.A. Lyubushin: On the Coherence between Dynamics of the Worlds Fuel Consumption and
Global Temperatur Anomaly” , Energy and Environment, 14, no. 6 (2003)……available on “www.multi-science.co.uk”.
It is the best and longest forecast in existence, which can claim accuracy and merits to be meticulously studied on their scientific approach……. [Willis, I am sure their approach is one
collar size too large for you….].
Those two authors deserve honour, because their 2003 forecast is still valid. On the opposite,
all above mentioned CMIP5-simulants must be sent straight to the Purgatory, because
they notoriously simulate wrong. The reason for this lies in the fact that they, on political
purpose, omit 5 major climate drivers.
JS.

I agree the warmistas correlation of Hiroshima bomb where it has anything to do with science. Maybe the warmistas need to read that between December 1937 and March 1938 at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by Japanese invading troops. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped; many of them were then mutilated or murdered. Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled. To this day the Japanese government has refused to apologize for these and other World War II atrocities, and a significant sector of Japanese society denies that they took place at all.

But just as warmistas do in diverting from the disciplines of science, they freely regard their opposition Holocaust deniers. Which is another demonetization of nothing to do with climate or anything science.

Without another great el nino the farther this cooling stretch continues, your graph can extend in both directions almost simultaneously. Soon enough it will read “No Global Warming for 200 Years” then….

“At last, at long last, the Pause is having its effect. The modelers, and those – such as the IPCC – who have until recently placed a naïve and complete faith in them to which no mathematician would have subscribed for an instant unless he had been very well paid to do so, are beginning, just beginning, to wake up and smell the coffee. Will somebody tell the politicians before they squander any more of your money and mine?”

Excellent work. Let’s see if they try to put the genie back in the bottle.

A poster brought out this point a while back, and I think it bears repeating.
If you have a child in high school (17 years old and in grade 11-12 in Canada) all they have heard throughout their lifetime is how global warming is going to harm the planet and eventually destroy humankind. Yet, for their whole lifetime there has been no global warming. What are these young people to think about today’s climate “scientists” ?. (I use the word scientist loosely when applying it to climate.) As I said, when a poster brought this point up it gave me pause to reflect on what the young people must think.

The models are clearly wrong. !he fact that our wonderful Met Office uses the same models to make their hopelessly inaccurate weather forecasts, together with the 212 month pause should make the “Believers” see that they are wrong. Sadly I do not think it will make a jot of difference to their thinking.
If as Christopher has suggested, the el Niño event causes atmospheric temperatures to rise, then the “Believers” will be telling us that AGW has resumed, because all the heat that miraculously disappeared into the oceans has miraculously reappeared!
AGW theory of course transcends the Laws of Thermodynamics.

The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says: “Those two bombs cost many Japanese lives, but saved countless American ones. Given ALL that we know, and given the time and opportunity again, it was STILL the right thing to do, and (on a different continent) Bomber Harris was still correct in every thing he did – including Dresden. ”
I am an American and I agree with you. My father was a Marine in that war and I might not be here if we had not dropped those bombs.
I still think we should have dropped 4 to 8 W-88 bombs on Mecca after 911. If we had, we wouldn’t be having the problems we are with Islam.

Hiroshima was tragic, and therein lies the heinousness of their use of the term. Emperor Hirohito is equally to blame, if not more so. He was given ample warning, and chose either to use his own citizenry as human shields, or to believe that the U.S. was bluffing.

It isn’t just after 1998. Before 1998 the models are far more likely to be on the high side of the actual temperatures. Furthermore, presenting a yellow “band” of CMIP5 is highly misleading, as it suggests that there are single models that spend most of their time near the lower border. There may be, but nearly all of them bounce between the lower and the upper border. Even though there are pre-1998 ranges were the “CMIP5 envelope” includes the temperature (on the low edge of things) or where the temperature fluctuates up into the yellow, there actually might not be a single model in CMIP5 that spends any significant fraction of its time below the actual RSS temperature.

So they are well advised to be honest and take the pause seriously. It is strong evidence that the models are failing, and as you point out there are numerous reasons (and always have been) that they might fail. It isn’t even “surprising” — in any field but climate science one would expect to fail, fail for decades, if one were trying to solve a problem half as difficult as quantitatively predicting the climate with inadequate data, inadequate computational resources, an inadequate theory, and the complication of an enormous dose of human bias.

Excuse me but your opinion of Hiroshima is dead wrong and based upon ignorance and emotion rather than historical fact. We were involved in a total war, perhaps you forgot. I never gave much credence to the surprise attack scenario. The attack on the US was inevitable and a declaration of war is small potatoes.FDR wanted us to be attacked so he could have a united nation boiling over with righteous anger. This was what he got. But your revisionist and insulting slap at our history is dead wrong and you should retract it. I have a letter, from my father,written two days before thefirst atomic bomb; it was a tentative goodbye letter to my mother. My father like many cobat troops was already part of the force chosen to go to Japan for the invasion which was expected to have huge casualties. I can tell you, that as far as I and my brother concerned and many thousands of othersin the same boat, that we were overjoyed my father did not have to land in Japan and die there, or be wounded or crippled. Your historical ignorance is shocking in this context, please rectify it. I do agree with your climate stance, of course, but this is an important issue,imo.

It was unfortunate that the Japanese having lost the war before the home islands, except Okinawa, had been invaded, did not surrender. However you can not ignore the Marine, soldier, and sailor deaths and ships sunk in the reduction of this one island. The loses of American and
British and Japanese lives that would occurred if the home islands were invaded would have been horrendous, much greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese were given opportunities to end the war prior to the bomb dropping but the war cabinet could not envision surrender. Just like so few Japanese surrendered during the island hopping campaigns it would have been a slaughter if the invasion had occurred. The bombs gave the Emperor the reason to override the military government.

Monckton loses much of my respect due to Hiroshima crack. The Japanese were a savage enemy with stubbornly homicidal and suicidal tactics (kamikaze, banzai charges, suicide naval missions, biological warfare, etc.) and strategy.
What would Monckton preferred, the oncoming amphibious invasion? Would he like to look back on
Dieppe X 800;
Gallipoli X 20;
Normandy X 25?
And these are just invasion deaths, not casualties, not losses of defenders or civilians. This Monckton prefers? Oh, the first two failed, BTW.
You want atrocities? Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin…
Not to insult our UK friends (and allies), but a POME like Monckton seems good at climate, but knee-jerk anti-American in his history.

It should be said that the Pacific conflict (7Dec1941-15Aug1945) was the most horrific bit of war ever between two combatants (Axis and Allies). Most of the fighting was without quarter. Atrocities occurred on both sides. The death toll was staggering. Only the promise of complete destruction of Japan brought about their surrender. In my opinion it is a gross disrespect to the dead of both sides to use this war in any way involving climate activism.

His Lordship disapproves of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That can be argued about on both practical and moral grounds. But when The Ghost of Big Jim Cooley says: “Bomber Harris was still correct in every thing he did – including Dresden” I wonder what TTGOBJC’s justification for that is. If he can give just one proven ‘benefit’ of bombing Dresden I will be mighty impressed. Please don’t claim that it greatly disrupted the transport system. It didn’t. The railways were back to running within four days of the bombing. Please don’t claim that it assisted the Red Army. It didn’t, except that it gave the Soviet Union a stick with which to beat the Western Powers for decades thereafter. Please don’t claim it destroyed important war industries. It didn’t: Dresden produced hardly anything of military importance. Please don’t claim that it shortened the war by inflicting terror on the Germans. It didn’t. If inflicting terror had any effect it would have had effect after Hamburg, Cologne and all the earlier raids. Germany gave up when their armies were defeated, not when the government caved into civilian – or even military – pressure from bombing.

[Stop.

No more comments or opinions or discussion in this thread on the Lord’s single use of one phrase about one bombing.

Could a super El Nino cause the 1998 record for RSS to be broken in 2014? Can 2014 end with the 17 year pause in tact?

The average anomaly in 1998 was 0.55. The average for the first three months this year so far is 0.213. So a simple equation can be set up as follows to see what average would be required for the remaining 9 months to set a record.
12(0.55) = 3(0.213) + 9x. Solving for x gives 0.66. Naturally this is above 0.55, but a more important number now is what is the highest 9 month average during the 1998 super El Nino. According to the following plot of RSS with a mean of 9 months, that number is 0.63.
See: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996/mean:9
Of course this is below 0.66, however the 9 month average at the start of the 1998 El Nino was around 0, whereas it is around 0.2 now. So the climb to potentially set a record is not as high.
It is possible for an El Nino that is almost as strong as the 1998 El Nino to set a record, however things have to move fast. The April anomaly for RSS does not necessarily have to be 0.66, but as a guess, I would say it should jump to at least 0.4 from 0.213 now and then it must make good jumps in the next months. According to the graph above, when the December number for RSS is in, the new 9 month height must be just above the 1998 nine month height in order for a new record to be set.
I would be very surprised if 2014 broke the 1998 record. In 1997, the El Nino started in May 1997 and the peak did not come until about March 1998. Right now, we are still in neutral so there is just not enough time in my opinion to break the 1998 mark this year. As for 2015, who knows?
By the same argument, if we assume it takes a while for an El Nino to form and for it to affect RSS temperatures, I predict that at least to the end of 2014, RSS will still have over 17 years of pause. To verify this for yourself, note the area BELOW the line in the top graph of this post between August 1996 and December 1997. If temperatures do spike, the August 1996 date has a bit of room to be moved forward until December 1997 is hit.

My guess is the warmists will still find some climate-based rationale to tax and regulate everything to death, confiscate the fruits of our labor, and oppress us in every detail of our daily lives, no matter now long the “pause” (actually now the cooling) continues. Let’s not forget that their agenda really has nothing to do with climate, and everything to do with misanthropy and greed.

Steve in Seattle says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:56 pm “Regarding the statistic of 510 Tarameters ( Tera ? ) squared, I have a question. What percentage is water ?”

I am curious if 70.8% represents just ocean coverage? It seems logical that since Greenland and Antarctica are also covered with water that it be included in the percentage of the globe covered with water, regardless of being solid or liquid.

When a unit occurs in exponentiation, for example, in km^2, the size prefix (k) is considered part of the unit, and thus included in the exponentiation.
A square kilometer is 10^6 square meters, not 10^3 square meters, and so on:
1 Tm^2 = (10^12)^2 m^2 = 10^24 m^2

MaxLD says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:49 am
Yet, for their whole lifetime there has been no global warming.
——————————————————————————————-
Your statement is misstated. Their whole lifetime has so far experienced a very warm period in time. What will those children think as the next several decades descends into a cooler climate?

Steve in Seattle says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:56 pm “Regarding the statistic of 510 Tarameters ( Tera ? ) squared, I have a question. What percentage is water ?”
—————————————————————–
Could the differences between the north and south hemispheres be pointing to the main reason why the models fail? Note that the models fit the best into the upper NH, where the greatest land mass resides. Does this indicate how poorly their understanding of oceanic dynamics and effects are? That looks like their major fail spot. I can usually make good connections by reading graphs. Yet, I see no connections between CMIP5 and RSS TLT. Even in the NH graph, where the RSS sits the best within CMIP, there is no correlation between the peaks and valleys of CMIP5 to the observed shifts in the real world, except by coincidence.

MaxLD says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:49 am
Like post-apartheid South Africa – another freedom generation. There, the freedom generation is 20 years (probably effectively close to all those under 25 years old). In general, one more year before our global warming freedom generation become of age to vote!

“Disgraceful atrocity” my ass. SOME of the civilians killed at Hiroshima were innocent: the children too small to support the Japanese war effort, but the entire adult population was united in supporting the war. For a clue, immediately after Pearl Harbor several thousand Japanese AMERICANS demanded repatriation to Japan so that they would fight AGAINST America, and the very first Japanese American who had a chance to choose sides in an actual fight smuggled guns to a captured Japanese pilot who had gone down during the Pearl Harbor attack. The interning of Japanese Americans who failed to resettle out of the Pacific defense zone (that’s right, nobody had to go into an internment camp if they were willing to try to resettle elsewhere), was NOT without good cause.

Know who was innocent? The American soldiers who fought and sometimes died turning back Japans murderous aggression. That’s right, defenders against unjust war are innocent. They have done no wrong, but have only chosen to fight on the side of right, which is beyond innocent. It is supererogatory, while every death caused by the aggressors is a murder. The entire Japanese adult population abetted those murders. The Bomb saved the lives of at least a half a million innocent American soldiers. That is it’s justification, but it also had extreme benefits for Japan and the world. It saved several million Japanese lives and kept Japan from being enslaved by Russia.

Hiroshima does not have to have been an atrocity for it to be atrocious for Cook to use energy used to incinerate human beings (however justifiably) as a yardstick for measuring the completely benign solar energy accumulation in the climate system (however small that accumulation has been).

It can only be a pause if it were known for certain that the upward trend will continue sometime in the future. Without a TARDIS or an accurate crystal ball, no-one knows which way the trend line will go after levelling out these past 17 years.

We should call it what it is, a halt.

The warmists choose their language very carefully – ‘climate change deniers’, as Lord Monkton points out, being one of their most insidious. We should not accept their loaded terminology.

If I could have a nitpick as well, with respect.
The convention for SI units (Systeme International) is to use a lower-case letters for the whole unit name. For example 0.704 watts and not 0.704 Watts.
Similarly, it should be 0.13 kelvin and not 0.13 Kelvin. The other thing to avoid is saying degrees kelvin since the units are kelvins and not degrees (convention since 1967).
Abbreviations for the SI units have their own rules, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

I modeled the pause a few weeks ago based on Bob Tisdale’s step theory, and showed that both warming and stasis can be explained by intense El Nino events or lack of, respectively. The model tells me that the current developing El Nino will only break the long running stasis if it is hard and fast, that is, intensity is the key.

Perhaps it will be a slow, noisy El Nino, followed by an intense La Nina, leading to cooling? One can only hope!

5 April: UK Times: Matt Ridley: A Rough Ride to the Future by James Lovelock
This book reveals that James Lovelock, at 94, has not lost his sparkling intelligence, his lucid prose style, or his cheerful humanity. May Gaia grant that we all have such talents in our tenth decades, because the inventor of gadgets and eco-visionary has lived long enough to recant some of the less sensible views he espoused in his eighties…http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/non-fiction/article4052719.ece

I agree that we should have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the demand for unconditional surrender as was put forth by the allies almost guaranteed a fight to the death. It is unrealistic to think that Japan would have surrendered before the bloodbath in Okinawa. Or before the atomic bombs fell. Also: Recall that both were legitimate military targets, not simply the abodes of civilians.

MaxLD says:
If you have a child in high school (17 years old,,, all they have heard throughout their lifetime is how global warming is going to harm the planet and eventually destroy humankind,,,. it gave me pause to reflect on what the young people must think.

They MUST THINK the “warming is accelerating”. No other thought is allowed.

‘This is an interesting moment: for more than half of the satellite record, RSS shows no global warming at all.’, because this is where the heat is going!

‘Warming is going on the human fingerprint is clear in the data, but there are other things that are also in the game, the top figure there which has the global temperature the one below is the El Nino influence. If you put a huge amount of hot water in the middle of the Pacific, the atmosphere can’t heat it up very easily. If you put a huge amount of cold water in the Pacific the atmosphere can heat it up easily and so whether the heat is going mostly into the atmosphere or the ocean for the short term is influenced by El Nino and La Nina and in the last decade much of the heat has been going into the ocean and less into the atmosphere. This is something that wobbles…ultimately the ocean and the atmosphere have to be coupled and it is simply how much warming is already been realised in the atmosphere…the long term picture yes heat is still accumulating in the earth’s system with high confidence, no there hasn’t been a stop in global warming…where did it go and there is finally the ability to make statements about heat going into the deep ocean, the Argo floats and other advances have come just in time…I think this is fair to say that this is just enough to see what is going on…a lot of heat has got into the ocean and it’s gotten pretty far down…that’s really deep!’ R Alley.

your algebra appears suspect, but lets check.
nobody really talks about huge land areas in
square metres, yet this is what we need for
ISO unit calculations. Usually on planetary
scales we might expect to use sq km.

The reasons for the discrepancy between the predicted and observed warming rate are currently under investigation by a number of research groups. Possible reasons include…

Does this bother anybody else as much as it bothers me? Why don’t these guys shut up for a few decades? Please, guys, go back to your desks. Fix the theories, fix the models, and take the time to verify your results this go round before you rabble rouse about CAGW again, ok?

JeezUz. Nothing more irritating than premature scientific ejaculation all over the place. It damages the credit rating of science in general when climate scientists do this.

Larry Hamlin says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:27 am
………………
In the UN WGI AR5 report the climate models were shown to exaggerate and overstate projected increases in global temperatures based on CO2 levels assumed present in the atmosphere compared to actual observed global temperatures. This is extremely important given that the WGII report uses these exaggerated climate model higher global temperature projection scenarios to assess climate risks associated with increasing global CO2 levels……

So they assume the models are good for the rest of the 21st century? Then we have this from the IPCC SPM.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)16………16 No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.

There is now a consensus of no consensus on whether we will bask in a little extra warmth or fry. This is near useless, disband the IPCC now!Abstract – August 2013
David W. Pierce et al
The Key Role of Heavy Precipitation Events in Climate Model Disagreements of Future Annual Precipitation Changes in California
Climate model simulations disagree on whether future precipitation will increase or decrease over California, which has impeded efforts to anticipate and adapt to human-induced climate change………Between these conflicting tendencies, 12 projections show drier annual conditions by the 2060s and 13 show wetter. These results are obtained from 16 global general circulation models downscaled with different combinations of dynamical methods…http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00766.1

No-one seems to have mentioned that when Lord Monckton reported in March, up to Feb 2014, there were 210 months of no warming. Now in March there have been 212 months of no warming; an increase of 2 months in only one month. So there was an addition of a month at the start of the period. Might this suggest the earth is cooling?

Alec Rawls, I agree with everything you said except possibly the mass internment of Americans of Japanese descent as it most definitely violated their constitutional rights, but it was a time of war and had the carriers been at Pearl Harbor instead of at sea Japan’s plan may have succeeded. Regardless you made some excellent points. My dad fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal after the first reinforcements in 1942. He was there for 18 months and never talked about it until shortly before he passed away in 2001.

No-one seems to have mentioned that when Lord Monckton reported in March, up to Feb 2014, there were 210 months of no warming. Now in March there have been 212 months of no warming; an increase of 2 months in only one month. So there was an addition of a month at the start of the period. Might this suggest the earth is cooling?
____________________
Maybe he just fat- fingered his calculator key.

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has has been a great defender of science and truth as the quite slanted global warming debate has evolved. Unfortunately, his poorly worded characterization of an historically central WW2 engagement has offended a great many of the English speaking peoples whose families were the key actors in both theaters of WW2. Perhaps a reading of Paul Fussell’s 1987 essay, “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”, might alter his views a bit. Let’s hope that this one slip does not sidetrack our appreciation for his work nor his own focus on same.

The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
“April 5, 2014 at 11:25 am
I’m English, not American, but war is war. It matters not one jot whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, it was a means to an end. Hindsight is a wonderous thing, and makes people who might otherwise appear intelligent, say something stupid. But try to think back to THAT time. The Japanese would have fought on for years, for every yard of land, such was their stupendous belief in their little world. Those two bombs cost many Japanese lives, but saved countless American ones. Given ALL that we know, and given the time and opportunity again, it was STILL the right thing to do, and (on a different continent) Bomber Harris was still correct in every thing he did – including Dresden. Mr Monckton, you may consider retraction of a particular piece of your writing.”

Quite correct Big Jim, except for the case of Dresden which was an insignificant target in military terms, packed with refugees from the east, and an artistic and architectural marvel. Thousands of innocent people were horribly burnt to death and artistic heritage destroyed for no strategic purpose. Dresden’s destruction had no effect on the rest of the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million lives in the war, but Dresden, none.
Fortunately Dresden is slowly being restored. but the refugees cannot be restored to life.

Lord Monckton, a few historical corrections to the Hiroshima beginnings of your otherwise excellent post. Japan refused to surrender in 1945, and the best estimate of a territorial slog based on Okinawa and Iwo Jima was another half million American dead. So Truman OKed the two nuclear bombs used for ‘shock, awe’ and to send a very clear message to ilcalcitrant fanatics.
My father flew B-29s during and after the war. He received the Legion of Merit, the only peacetime neck order, and rests at Arlington National Cemetery. As you may know, Judd Tibbets commanded the B-29 Enola Gay on its fateful Hiroshima mission. Dad knew Judd. the Enola Gay is in the Udvar Hazy aeronautics museum of the Smithsonian at Dulles. Dad used to proctor tours there of that airplane. He once received a large group questioning why. He asked, what about Iran today in the middle east? When that next generation tour group had no answer, he told them two things.
1.War is hell. So avoid war.
2.if you go to war, by all means win. We have it, the Iranians don’t (yet). Why not use it to prevent worse casualties, like was done in WW2?
Needless to say, the naive tour group slunk away kerfuffled after Dad showed them how crew enter a B-29, since there are no doors. (Hint, it ain’t easy from the front wheel well).
Regards. Do not get too maudlin/ politically correct about the harsh realities of the real world.

Nicholas Tesdorf: Innocent Germans?
Children certainly but none else I’m afraid. It was a war of peoples and the German people backed their Fuehrer to the limit and reaped the whirlwind.
The worst discovery since the war is that American companies were committing treason by helping the Germans. Watson and IBM, Standard Oil, Ford, Chase Bank City Bank, the list goes on and on. We gave them the loans, the early computer technology, the synthetic rubber and trucks on and on.

“So they assume the models are good for the rest of the 21st century? Then we have this from the IPCC SPM.”

Your point is absolutely correct. The WGI report in Chapter 11 significantly reduces the estimate for global temperature increase out to the year 2035 from the year 2005 to between 0.3 to 0.7 degrees C with the likely value at 0.4 degrees C. This is done using “expert assessment” versus relying on the much higher climate model projections which were in the range 0.5 to 1.0 degrees C with the likely value of 0.7 degrees C with these latter values simply being way too high given the measured temperature record over the last 15 years.

Since the climate model temperature projections were determined in the WGI analysis to be way too high for the year 2035 these models projections would of course be even worse for the year 2100. But these exaggerated high climate model projections going out to 2100 are in fact used as the basis for the WGII climate risk assessments. This is absurd.

This issue seems to be invisible but in fact is absolutely crucial and should be the major point being addressed by those confronting the ridiculous positions presented in the UN’s WGII climate risk assessment report. This WGII report is a debacle because the WGII assessment process did not address the global climate model shortcomings clearly established in the WGI report.

MaxLD says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:49 am
Yet, for their whole lifetime there has been no global warming.
——————————————————————————————-
Your statement is misstated. Their whole lifetime has so far experienced a very warm period in time. What will those children think as the next several decades descends into a cooler climate?
Those are two distinctly different things. Warming refers to an actual increase in temperature, but there hasn’t been any increase, thus they have not experienced global warming. Though, they have experienced plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth about it from so-called “grownups”, so I guess that’s something.

“Yet we should not crow. A strongish el Niño – we are rather overdue for one – may well shorten the Pause quite a bit, but probably only until the subsequent la Niña a year or two later, whereupon the Pause may resume and perhaps continue embarrassingly to lengthen for a decade and more. Or so my model tells me, and that means it must be right. Right?”

Pretty much what I think too (For what that’s worth)
Mid 2015 should be a big drop like 1986 1994 2001 and 2008 (7.5 yeras apart)
but then a return to “normal” with a slow cooling into the future.

Do the ‘Warmists’ understand what they are doing by trying their hopes to a ‘natural variation’ like the El Nino. It makes their constant cries about ‘Global Warming is caused solely by CO2′ into a nonsense chant It really doesn’t help their case to crow over a putative temperature rise caused by a natural agent like the El Nino (which NO ONE has ever shown even the SLIGHTEST correlation with CO2 level)? It’s as if they think that Temp Increase == CO2 causality, which is nonsense to even the most casual observer.

MaxLD says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:49 am
Yet, for their whole lifetime there has been no global warming.
——————————————————————————————-
Your statement is misstated. Their whole lifetime has so far experienced a very warm period in time. What will those children think as the next several decades descends into a cooler climate?
Those are two distinctly different things. Warming refers to an actual increase in temperature, but there hasn’t been any increase, thus they have not experienced global warming. Though, they have experienced plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth about it from so-called “grownups”, so I guess that’s something.

======================

Actually VERY interesting to learn the the actual temperatures in 1912 were HIGHER than the actual temperatures in 2013 even tho the ‘anomaly temperature’ in 2013 was “LOWER” than the anomaly temperature in 1912.

Jim Cripwell says:
April 5, 2014 at 3:46 pmSo there was an addition of a month at the start of the period. Might this suggest the earth is cooling?

All it means is that the March value of 0.214 was below the “zero” line of 0.233. This has the potential of adding another month at the other end. The negative slope for 210 months was -2.8 x 10^-4. This time, it just became negative by the skin of its teeth to come in at -9.7 x 10^-6. I can guarantee you that if April also comes in at 0.214, there will NOT be an extra month added at the other end. The July 1996 value was 0.116, so the April value needs to be very close to 0.116 (or lower) in order for a month (or more) to be added at the other end.

I wonder how long this has to go on until the true believers lose faith? Will they ever? Will 20 years of pause do it? 25 years? What if temps actually start dropping, will they still say it’s only temporary until the warming continues, or will they claim AGC?

Given the alarmist claim 18 years of no warming is not significant, doesn’t that mean 18 years of warming is insignificant – thus we need warming for 18 straight years before they can claim it is significant.

Actually VERY interesting to learn the the actual temperatures in 1912 were HIGHER than the actual temperatures in 2013 even tho the ‘anomaly temperature’ in 2013 was “LOWER” than the anomaly temperature in 1912.

You are obviously taking this from my post on Thursday. However I need to correct you here. JULY of 1912 was warmer than any JANUARY in the 2000s. And this talks about actual temperatures and not anomalies.

Patrick B says:
April 5, 2014 at 5:37 pmGiven the alarmist claim 18 years of no warming is not significant

For the alarmists, it is significant if there is no warming at the 95% level for 15 years. We are past that on all global data sets.

”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

“Possible reasons include increased oceanic circulation leading to increased subduction of heat into the ocean, higher than normal levels of stratospheric aerosols due to volcanoes during the past decade, incorrect ozone levels used as input to the models, lower than expected solar output during the last few years, or poorly modeled cloud feedback effects. It is possible (or even likely) that a combination of these candidate causes is responsible.””

1. Ocean circulation: yes. the models cannot get the timing of PDO correct. The reason is the starting intitial conditions ( in 1850) are unknown.
2. Higher aerosols: When you run the models you have to assume future volcanos. They assume zero
so models will always bias high
3. Bad ozone levels. Yup, thats an input problem
4. Low TSI: again an input problem
5. cloud feedback modelling.

Thats 4 input problems ( they will never be eliminated) and 1 physics problem.

They missed the one thing that explains the pause the best, a downturn in ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean due to a well known, longer term ~60 year cyclic phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, where cooling set in starting around the early 2000s, whose underlying cause is not well understood.

This oscillation was positive between ~1975-2005 and had a marked effect on warming between the late 1970s and the early 2000s.

Because the Pacific itself does not generate its own heat, the modellers never took account of this cycle in their models, in fact the PDO was only discovered in 1996, just after most modellers and other researchers within climate science were already attributing warming from greenhouse gases (including Michael Mann). So the PDO was never integrated into the early models, and it has stayed that way since. If the models were correct, the warming would have continued, the fact that it hasn’t has given good evidence that the positive PDO was a major factor in the warming between ~1978-1998.

The other problem, is to explain the long-term underlying trend of warming throughout the 20th century, since the PDO doesn’t generate its own heat, an argument commonly used to dismiss it as a factor in late 20th century warming. The answer is the sun.

Solar activity was high well into the late 20th century, this not only warmed the oceans, but produced a multi-decadal heat time lag, after peak solar activity was reached around the 1960s, meaning maximum temperatures in both the ocean and the atmosphere wouldn’t be reached until several decades after maximum solar activity (the same as maximum heat in the day well after noon, and max seasonal temperature occur ~6 weeks or so after the summer solstice etc). The combination of a multi-decadal heat time lag from the sun, and a positive ocean oscillation in the Pacific, meant that the late 20th century experienced a steady and rather sudden increase in warming, once again, offset several decades after peak solar activity, which totally confounded the modellers.

It is these 2 confounding variables, a solar heat time lag of several decades or so, and a 30 year oscillating temperature cycle in the Pacific, which confused the modellers into thinking that greenhouse gases were the dominant cause of warming between ~1978-1998 and not natural cycles, an assumption now disproved by the lack of warming since around 2000. In addition, there is evidence that both the PDO and solar activity affects cloud cover, magnifying their heating and cooling effects. It is therefore entirely possible that the climate can be very sensitive to the sun and ocean cycles, but not sensitive to c02, due to the differential effects these have on cloud formation, a factor also not integrated into the models, where it is assumed that climate sensitivity is the same regardless of the forcing. This would explain such things as a strong Medievel Warm Period due to relatively small changes in solar activity, without the need to then assume that climate is also sensitive to c02.

The reasons given for the pause by the researchers above, are still missing the point, they are NOT looking at longer term cycles. Their frame of reference is too short, they need to extend the research back well into the 20th century, and then they can see the forest for the trees.

Since the late 1980s “Climate Science” has ever more balkanized themselves with the “anomaly”, i.e. a deviation from some sort of mean value.

Over the years there have been ill fated notions of “Climatological Mean” i.e. a period of time from which to difference numbers, temperature, and derive something sinister in the minds of the “Climate Scientists”.

I will not belabor the nonsense of the “Climatological Mean”.

Consider this: for instance, in 2000 the average land-surface temperature of the Arctic was -10 C. Then in 2010 the average land-surface temperature of the Arctic was -5 C, an “anomaly” of +5 C per decade !

The anomaly +5 C is still below freezing ! So what does such an “Anomaly” portend ? NOTHING !

So, the hallowed “Climate Science” “Anomaly” is a falsehood ! because it has NO reference by which to judge !

OH ! Some enterprising chap might say, “Let’s use 0 C as the reference to Judge all that come !”

Jolly Good ! and Jolly Bad !

The presumption is that temperature is a unique variable and independent of any other thing !

Wrong !

The Gas Laws show how temperature is coupled to pressure and they are coupled to concentration of chemical component.

Thus, we can lower pressure and achieve boiling at room temperature, and increase pressure and achieve freezing at room temperature !

Lord Monckton, Please accept my sincere apology for this apparently off topic post that I am trying to get to the bottom of. Thank you!

dccowboy says:
April 5, 2014 at 5:23 pmActually VERY interesting to learn the the actual temperatures in 1912 were HIGHER …

Werner Brozek says:
April 5, 2014 at 5:38 pmYou are obviously taking this from my post on Thursday.

The title of my post started as:
“July 1912 (GISS anomaly = -0.47) was warmer than…”

dccowboy says:
April 5, 2014 at 6:24 pmWerner Brozek says:
April 5, 2014 at 5:38 pm
‘Actually’, I wasn’t. So you need to reign in your self-adoration just a bit.

Both my post and what you said was “interesting” was with regards to a “warm 1912”.

So if you learned:
“Actually VERY interesting to learn the the actual temperatures in 1912 were HIGHER than the actual temperatures in 2013”,
you learned the wrong thing. I can only come to one conclusion due to the extreme coincidences involved. Namely some other site misquoted me and you “learned” the wrong thing from the site that misquoted me. Please let me know from where you got your erroneous information so I can verify my suspicions. Thank you!

James Hansen blames the recent hiatus on El Nino and then assures us we are going to BURN by 2050. At least he has been decent enough to grant us a few more years. I thought NASA had jettisoned this embarrassing twit!http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha08510t.html

@Alec Rawls –
The same response can be given to those who whine about the bombing of Germany, and ESPECIALLY Dresden, which was one of the strongest bases of popular support for Hitler and the Nazis. And yes, the bombing of Dresden is known to have precipitated the rapid deterioration of morale in the German armies and likely saved tens of thousands of American and Russian lives – many more than were killed in the bombing, which number has been greatly exaggerated – it was between 15,000 and 20,000, not the 135,000 so often claimed by whiners.

If Lord Monckton introduced the topic and insulted some of us, why is off topic for us to respond?
Is he free to insult but immune from being requested to apologize?
Sounds like biased censorship to me. I guess there is a first time for everything on WUTU.

And if it is off-thread to disagree, why is it not off-thread for him make the insult in the first place? Seems like the moderator should have grabbed his insult and asked him to stick to climate science not personal attacks on an entire nation?

the two waves descending Indian Ocean and S. Pacific and the running back up the Atlantic is very interesting. If we can understand inter-annual modulation of that pattern we will be getting somewhere.

1. Ocean circulation: yes. the models cannot get the timing of PDO correct. The reason is the starting intitial conditions ( in 1850) are unknown.
________________________
Yep. 1850. Starting the models at the end of the “Little Ice Age” is the ultimate cherry- pick.
It goes right along with data manipulation to show the LIA and Medieval Warming Period didn’t exist. The main problem with the models’ outputs is the fundamental dishonesty of the model inputers.

But if even if they add the now known variations in aerosols, volcanism and solar it will make nearly no difference and models will still run just as hot, because that is not where the problem is. It’s the one physics problem that is at the heart of the spurious results. Cloud feedbacks are a key determining factor in climate and they just fudge it to fit their preconceptions.

Until that is dealt with, the missing heat will still be missing and models will be useless for anything but propaganda.

As I am the poster who made the first comment on Mr Monckton’s ‘mistake’, I hope the moderator will allow me a reply to some of the comments:

Nicholas Tesdorf: It is my opinion that you are incorrect about Dresden. Germany (its people) sowed the wind. Dresden (and there should have been others) suffered quite justifiably so. A nation cannot (or at least, should not) rise up against other peaceful nations and not expect to be flattened. Oh it’s so easy to speak from hindsight, to see any historical war in a different and new soft (and rather pathetic) light. But I say to you and others here, Dresden was a legitimate target – not because of any strategic position or nonsense to ‘justify’ its bombing – it was a legitimate target because it was German. Had I been alive at the time, I would have supported Bomber Harris, as most British people still do (I’m glad to say).

Imagine it’s 1939, not 2014:
Should a nation decide to take ‘that’ step toward war, it had better understand the consequences. The possibility of carpet bombing of residential areas is not just a real one, but an inevitable one. You have made the distinction between peace and war, and you have decided war. I’ll repeat, for those who cannot grasp basic reasoning here; you have decided war. Your nation will therefore reap the whirlwind that follows. Should that whirlwind be incredible, shocking, bombing of residential streets, or a new device capable of killing hundred of thousands in one second, is completely immaterial. You will suffer the consequences of your decision, and rightly so.

I’m afraid the darling of we sceptics here has had his crown tarnished by his own hand. I find it odd that he didn’t impose his own editing when writing to a largely-US audience. But then, people who one might often see as intelligent and learned, so often make the most basic and stupid of mistakes. We usually call them politicians. There’s little point in asking Mr Monckton to ‘read up’ as that is not what is required here. What is a necessity is to see things in a logical, rational way. It’s what ‘intelligence’ actually is. You need to reason, Mr Monckton, not to see things with hindsight.

@ Davidg 4.42 pm April 5,
The worst discovery since the war is that American companies were committing treason by helping the Germans,
The worst thing is the fact that the names of the families that owned those corporations that collaborated with the Nazi’s, the Russians, Chinese and Japanese are rarely mentioned! And if they are ? It’s OK it seems!, You know they are the “beautiful people!”. The ones I am frightened off more are the the people that are not mentioned! ever! diversions, diversions.

Daniel G’s description (April 5, 2014 at 1:22 pm) of how to use SI unit prefixes such as kilo (k) and (tera (T) is perfectly correct.

The Earth’s surface is 5.1 * 10^14 square metres

It is wrong to say 510 Tm^2 because this means 510 * 10^24 square metres (since the ‘Tera’ is also raised to the power 2 when it is written like this) – but writing 510 * 10^12 square metres is acceptable.
Mod is wrong because the convention does not allow the combining of prefixes as in 510 Mkm^2 and it wouldn’t be right anyway.

Quote:
… in one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare …
_________________________________

Sorry, Monk, but why do you always do this? Why do you always shoot yourself in the foot??

This is a climate debate – you know, rain, wind, temperature and the like. And you do that bit quite well. But then you cannot help shoving a great dollop of politics or religion into the debate – WHERE IT DOES NOT BELONG.

You end up being divisive, at a time when we need to present the united face and voice of skepticism. Thus your contributions are not welcome here. Please take your CND spin and Papal dogma elsewhere.

Are the alarmists starting to back off with their absurd claims? What more can we wish for?

Thank you for pointing this to our attention Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. And also for demonstrating how disproportionate and misplaced their WWII-parallels are. Never mind those scoring their own goals in John Kerry’s team here right now. You made my day.

I hope that the democratic, human right respecting civilizations will snap off cAGW coma soon and remain grateful to all those who stand for scientific method based truth with their own name against Mann, Lew et al slander, ADL bias and worse.

nicholas tesdorf says: April 5, 2014 at 3:58 pm
Quite correct Big Jim, except for the case of Dresden which was an insignificant target in military terms.
____________________________

Incorrect.

The purpose of Dresden was to show the Russians (who entered Dresden shortly after) the devastating power of bomber command. It was a warning-shot to Russia, not Germany.

The purpose of Dresden was to prevent Russia from steam-rolling all the way to the Atlantic coast – and therefore to prevent WWIII from starting before WWII had even ended. As such, the bombing of Dresden probably saved the lives of 50 million people.

Patrick B on April 5, 2014 at 5:37 pm
Given the alarmist claim 18 years of no warming is not significant, doesn’t that mean 18 years of warming is insignificant – thus we need warming for 18 straight years before they can claim it is significant.
…………………………….
That’s how science works, but not how alarmism works.

You see, cAGW cannot be falsified. No amount of “pause” or even cooling will falsify CAGW,

David L. says:
David L. says:
April 5, 2014 at 5:29 pm
I wonder how long this has to go on until the true believers lose faith? Will they ever? Will 20 years of pause do it? 25 years? What if temps actually start dropping, will they still say it’s only temporary until the warming continues, or will they claim AGC?

The next ploy by the alarmists will be that CO2 increases will cause acidification of the seas. With no global warming CO2 must be vilified in a different way. The alarmists will not go away but they will change tactics.

It’s very unfortunate that the author of this post mentioned an event that occurred at the end of WWII. I almost always avoid going off-topic, but I can’t let this simplistic and incomplete representation slip by.

As others have mentioned above, Dresden in Germany was subjected to firebombing, and the name Bomber Harris was also noted. It seems that explicit identifications have not been mentioned. The British RAF led the firebombing of Dresden and it’s a fact that the British RAF led the firebombing of several cities in Germany, not only Dresden, but Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin also.

Harris of the British RAF developed, improved and optimized procedures for effective firebombing of civilian populations in German cities.

The upper 300 metres temperature anomaly in the eastern Pacific from 180W to 100W is the most reliable predictor of the ENSO of all prediction methods giving about 1 to 2 months lead-time.

(One can also make some guesses about where this measure is going to go in the next month afterward and provide even more lead-time. I see it going up a little for a month or so, then peaking, and going back down over the next 8 months. But all that depends on what the subsurface currents at the equator do. I’m just going by what they typically do).

And then the Trade Winds which haven’t done much in the last month. A little less strong than average (chart is inversed so that one can see the correlation better). These numbers are far from the Super-El Nino ones but there is still time for more slackening to occur. Note we are more-or-less two months ahead in terms of conditions for the typical earliest timeline for a developing El Nino (but 20% of events are off the typical timelines).

This is pointing to an El Nino reaching about +2.0C (The only condition which can stop this now is the extent of cooler water in the eastern Pacific which off the equator, outside of +/- 5N and 5S which is extensive but doesn’t always impact the equatorial ocean conditions).

It appears that the “paid propagandists” at SkS may indeed be worthy of their hire. They chose to calculate Hiroshima bombs, rather than a larger natural event such as Krakatoa, specifically because of the image of thermonuclear destruction it evokes. It is a trap for the unwary!

Monckton steps into the booby-trap with both feet, ups the ante by use of the morally super-charged term atrocity, and loses half of what should be a relatively friendly audience. It got me to stop reading the essay. I’d call it mission accomplished for Sks.

David G says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:21 pm
Excuse me but your opinion of Hiroshima is dead wrong and based upon ignorance and emotion rather than historical fact. We were involved in a total war, perhaps you forgot. I never gave much credence to the surprise attack scenario. The attack on the US was inevitable and a declaration of war is small potatoes.FDR wanted us to be attacked so he could have a united nation boiling over with righteous anger. This was what he got. But your revisionist and insulting slap at our history is dead wrong and you should retract it. I have a letter, from my father,written two days before thefirst atomic bomb; it was a tentative goodbye letter to my mother. My father like many cobat troops was already part of the force chosen to go to Japan for the invasion which was expected to have huge casualties. I can tell you, that as far as I and my brother concerned and many thousands of othersin the same boat, that we were overjoyed my father did not have to land in Japan and die there, or be wounded or crippled. Your historical ignorance is shocking in this context, please rectify it. I do agree with your climate stance, of course, but this is an important issue,imo.

I agree with you on the historical perspective on the war with Japan. My father-in-law was a prisoner of war in Japan for about 4 years. He was moved to work as slave labor in a mine in the north of Japan to replace the previous GI’s who had been there previously, after being captured in the Phillipines, most of them having died due to the conditions there. He experienced brutal treatment while there, and was told by the guards that if the allies invaded Japan they would kill all the prisoners in order to go and fight for the homeland! He and many of his fellow prisoners are sure that that would in fact have happened and he is sure that the bomb saved his life. They woke up the morning after the bomb had been dropped to find all the guards gone, shortly thereafter an allied plane flew over and dropped leaflets telling them what had happened and telling them to stay put until relieved.

In your lucid lead post you refer frequently (in at least five separate paragraphs) to the honesty of statements in the RSS report. Nice.

Given the known growing lack of public trust in alarming CAGW claims from scientists then it is an effective strategy to explicitly evaluate the honesty of climate science statements systematically in a detailed one-by-one manner.

The IPCC inspired and sanctioned GSMs; they did not spring up independently of it. In their assessment process the IPCC created an unreasonable / unjustifiable primary dependence on the art of modeling (it isn’t a science but an art). The IPCC chose that art over other more convincing multiple rigorous scientific approaches to study the Earth-Atmosphere System (EAS).

It is now necessary, in order to advance the knowledge of the EAS, to redirect most of the funding from the art of GCMs to more fundamentally sound and rigorous scientific approaches. The pretty but incorrect art produced by modelers can be put in an modeler’s art museum.

NOTE: good show regarding your calling out the stupidity of John Cook’s atomic bomb references to promote his non-scientific alarmism and ideology. But I caution you always to keep references to military and religious memes to zero when the topic is just the science. I know personally that it is hard to do when the IPCC is unfortunately mixing non-science ideology and politics with science, but I think it is important to restrain the urge. N’est ce pas?

Lord Christopher is quite right in his denunciation of the bombing of Hiroshima. In fact all targeted bombings of civilian populations we’re against the conventions of war.
The ICRC Geneva Conventions web site states:
“The original humanitarian legislation represented by the First Geneva Convention of 1864 provided only for combatants, as at that time it was considered evident that civilians would remain outside hostilities”.

Clearly then both the Axis powers and the Allied powers, by persuing area bombing of cities had committed atrocities. The conventions of war do not allow a utilitarian weighing of civilian lives against the possibility of saving combatant lives such as has been suggested here.
In 1949 the Conventions were rewritten to make explicit the protection of civilian populations in conflicts.
Unfortunately, as we have seen in conflicts since that time combatant powers are now willing to make excuses such as “collateral damage”, or “surgical bombing”, “targeted drones” even, “shock and awe” as justification for bombing civilian populations.

Let me offer a wild thought: the data we have are neither sufficiently accurate nor suffiiciently complete to support an opinion on whether the earth’s climate is warming, cooling, or muttering along with no significant change. Even today the measurements we make are insufficiently precise to support decadal change estimates of less than a quarter of a degree (C).

Worse, the record has been ‘adjusted” in many ways, by many people, and with many differences in method. As a result most of our data is highy questionable – what we do know is that warmists adjusted early 20th century data downwards and late 20th century data upwards in order to show warming – but were caught at it in the late 90s, early 2000s. The “pause” data is, on other words, more likly to be closer to the original readings than the “warming period” data preceeding it.

it is possible, therefore, that there is no pause -because the warmig that supposedly paused didn’t happen. It may be difficult to accept, but apply almost any sensible period of natural variation (e.g. solar cycle durations), add some cycnicism about the exactness and coverage of the data, and the short term temperature record can be seen as pretty flat – no 00s pause, no 80s warming, no late 60s cooling.

Dan Hughes says:
April 6, 2014 at 6:04 am
It’s very unfortunate that the author of this post mentioned an event that occurred at the end of WWII. I almost always avoid going off-topic, but I can’t let this simplistic and incomplete representation slip by.

As others have mentioned above, Dresden in Germany was subjected to firebombing, and the name Bomber Harris was also noted. It seems that explicit identifications have not been mentioned. The British RAF led the firebombing of Dresden and it’s a fact that the British RAF led the firebombing of several cities in Germany, not only Dresden, but Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin also.

Harris of the British RAF developed, improved and optimized procedures for effective firebombing of civilian populations in German cities.

In response to the Blitzkreig carried out by the Luftwaffe it should be noted. Also at the time of the Dresden attack Nazi Germany was still targeting civilian targets in London using V2 missiles.

“I can guarantee you that if April also comes in at 0.214, there will NOT be an extra month added at the other end. The July 1996 value was 0.116, so the April value needs to be very close to 0.116 (or lower) in order for a month (or more) to be added at the other end.”

Really? What if June 1996 was very much higher so that we’re within a whisker of 2 (or more) months being added to the start of the pause? I don’t think you can generalise that months go on 1 at a time.

The use of the term ‘Forcing’ is at the heart of the IPCC’s scientific failure.

It is a Radiation Field, a potential energy flow to a sink at absolute zero, not a real energy flux. Only the vector sum of RFs at the surface gives the maximum real IR flux from surface to atmosphere – c 0.4 of a black body – and >60% of that is coupled convection and evapo-transpiration.

The reason is that each self-absorbed atmospheric GHG emission band annihilates the same energy band that would otherwise be emitted from the surface.

Most real ~0.16 black body net IR goes directly to space: there is near zero CO2-AGW, no extended GHE, the real GHE is from clouds – change of area + albedo.

I think far more Japanese exist today because the Bombs were dropped, than would exist had the Allies invaded the home islands. Could Hiroshima nevertheless be considered an atrocity? Yes, by any standard with which I would agree, but no more so than any other aspect of war which mankind loves to wage against itself.

On wars and the fact of more wars to come.
The North Viet Goverment nor the U.S. Goverment wanted any one to know how many NVA/VC were knowingly sent by the North down the trails of Laos to a known in advance death, while at the same time LBJ etal did not want anyone to know how many were in fact being killed.

Trouble is these Climate Change crimes may end up killing more long term with nothing but well placed lies.

It appears to me that this is not a pause in warming for 17 year, 8 months but more like cooling for 12 years and some odd months or 15yrs, etc. Choose a point like the warmists do in the very cold 1979 and we are all certainly doomed to a frigid, frozen future where government must save us from the catastrophe of the cold.

Several things, but first the pause. It is not a pause but cessation of warming, period. The existence of El Nino peaks and La Nina valleys is superimposed upon a background temperature. The period of the eighties and nineties contains a row of five El Ninos. If you put dots in the middle of a line connecting an El Nino peak and its neighboring La Nina valley you have defined a series of mean temperature points. They fit a horizontal straight line with very little random scatter. This shows that the temperature in the eighties and nineties was constant for eighteen years. If the super El Nino and its companion step warming had not appeared at that point the eighties and nineties platform would have connected smoothly to the twenty-first century platform and the entire satellite era would have have ended up with just one single, constant temperature. Second, seventeen years of no warming when the greenhouse theory of IPCC dictates vwarming is sufficient proof that their greenhouse theory is dead wrong and should be abandoned. The only greenhouse theory that correctly explains this lack of warming is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT). It differs from the Arrhenius theory used by the IPCC in being able to handle the general case of more than one greenhouse gas in the atmosphere simultaneously absorbing infrared radiation. In such a case it predicts that the gases actively absorbing establish an optimum absorption window which the jointly maintain. The gases that count in the earth atmosphere are carbon dioxide and water vapor. The optical thickness of their joint absorption window in the IR is 1.87., derived by Miscolczi from radiation theory. It corresponds to 15 percent transmittance or 85 percent absorbance in the IR. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb just as Arrhenius tells us. But that will increase optical thickness. And as soon as this happens water vapor will start to decrease, rain out, and optical thickness is restored to its initial value. That is the mechanism that prevents the atmosphere from warming up despite constant addition of carbon dioxide to air. But you could ask, how come it started only 17 years ago? The answer is that it did not start 17 years, it has always been active. Or, how about all the older warming we know was greenhouse warming? The answer is, it is not greenhouse warming, it is simply natural warming identified as greenhouse warming by over-eager pseudo-scientists. Miskolczi theory does not allow any greenhouse warming where the IPCC still uses it. But is it not true that Hansen proved the existence of greenhouse warming? Negative again. He had no idea what he was ding when he stood up in front of the Senate and declared the existence of greenhouse warming. Here is what he did. He had a rising temperature curve going from 1880 to 1988. Its peak in 1988 was the highest temperature within the last 100 years he pointed out. According to him there was only a half a percent chance that this could happen by chance. Hence, it followed that greenhouse effect had been detected. But there is a problem with that 100 year warming curve: it includes the early twentieth century warming from 1910 to 1940. Not even the IPCC has had the nerve to call this period greenhouse warming because there was not enough carbon dioxide in the air to make it noticeable. In view of this we should remove everything before 1940 from his 100 year warming curve. That lops off 60 years from the low end. What is left is a temperature curve consisting of 25 years of cooling, followed by 23 years of warming. No one in his right mind would try to argue that such a curve proves the existence of the greenhouse effect. But Hansen is totally unaware of this, insists that he has discovered the greenhouse effect, and we have to thank him for putting the IPCC on our backs.

Andrew says:
April 6, 2014 at 8:32 amReally? What if June 1996 was very much higher so that we’re within a whisker of 2 (or more) months being added to the start of the pause? I don’t think you can generalise that months go on 1 at a time.

As Jim noted, June 1996 is -0.0.24. However if June had been about 0.34 or higher, then we would have had 17 years and 10 months. And if May 1996 were then at least 0.24, then more months would have been added. I agree with the thrust of your comment that a single month does not mean much if there is a huge spike like a 1998 El Nino just beyond it. But in this case, there is only a tiny spike well back of the zero line. See: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1994/plot/rss/from:1996.55/trend

To fully formulate an opinion about the atomic bombings one should read Richard B. Frank’s “Downfall”. He cites the intercepted messages between the Japanese Foreign Minister and the ambassador to the Soviet Union, as well as the Emperor’s own diary. He quite plainly proves that as of the summer of 1945, Japan fully intended to employ its “Ketsu-Go” strategy of inflicting horrific losses on Americans and Brits invading Kyushu so as to force the Allies to accept a negotiated peace. The atomic bombings made it obvious that an invasion was not necessary to tear Japan apart and destroy the “national polity”. Frank also asks the question: do the 150,000-250,000 Asians dying each month under a brutal Japanese occupation have at least as much right to live as the Japanese civilians of the nation that launched the Pacific War that killed 17 million people?

Most countries have a voting age of 18. Therefore unless global warming resumes very soon, children will be reaching adulthood without having experienced global warming in their lifetimes. How large will Generation No Warming have to become before politicians begin to realise that tackling climate change is not a vote winner?

I do believe Monckton was referring to Hiroshima as an atrocity from the overall standpoint, both because its necessity due to the tides of war and in the loss of life it represented (which was unprecedented before, and thankfully never replicated since). That it saved Allied and Japanese lives overall is unquestioned. That it WAS necessary IS an atrocity, but it is one which speaks ill of human beings as a species, not just any one country or combatant side in a war.

As for other climate scientists referring to something equating to a force of energy equal to “one Hiroshima bomb”, that has been done for decades since the end of WWII. Nuclear weapons were themselves rated this way for many years, as a way of explaining to the average person the destructive capability of splitting the atom. I don’t believe for a second that any ill intent was meant… just a way of communicating the overall power of the increased energy that particular scientist feels the Earth’s biosphere has absorbed during a set period of time. In all, it is a minuscule sum compared to the total gross energy the Earth receives on a daily basis.

I DO however, believe that there is much malice associated with the term “Climate Denier”. That is a 100% intentionally-fabricated attempt to tar and feather skeptics. Everything political needs a scapegoat and a sexy term; “observed natural climate variability” simply doesn’t bring in the grant money, though it may ultimately be proven as the correct term to have been using all along.

Yes but one square kilometer is not 1,000 square meters. It is 1,000,000 square meters, otherwise 510e6 square kilometers would be 510e9 square meters, not 510e12 as later find YOU find out. If only you payed attention to what you were doing…

Game over, Google’s own calculation shows you wrong.

In the same way, 1 Tm^2 = (10^12)^2 m^2 = 10^24 m^2
The prefix is also squared, always.

@Jim Cripwell “I, .. contacted my MP, David McGuinty, .. He has very kindly forwarded my letter to our Minister of the Environment, and requested a response….Should I expect a reply in 2, 3, 6 or even 12 months?”

Shouldn’t we wait till the end of the century? That’s when the climate models will be tested.

Richard, you write “Climatically that’s in about 50 years” I assume you are being sarcastic. According to our parliamentary procedure, the Minister is obligated to reply to ALL queries by other MPs. I am sure David McGuinty will start to get worried if an answer does not appear in some definite length of time.

“It matters not one jot whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, it was a means to an end.”

So a fine patriotic man like yourself would have had no qualms about point-blank execution of those same civilians, women and children too, to bring an end to the war? Or is it different when you do it from the air with bombs and the ugly details are not in your face?

Forgive me if the answer is obvious to everyone else, but – on another blog – someone tried to point out that the straight line on this chart is at the 0.23 or 0.24C level for the past 17+ years. My assumption was that – during this period anyway – actual temperatures have stayed flat (on average) over the reference period, whenever it was.

What these bloggers are claiming instead is that the 0.23C number actually represents the annual INCREASE in temperature, which would be revealed if absolute temperature numbers were used on this chart, instead of anomalies. I think that they are probably full of sh*t, but I have made mistakes myself in the past by assuming I know what the numbers represent.

Can someone clarify, please? 17 years at an annual increase per year of 0.23C would result in a crazy high temperature increase, so that CAN’T be possible, right?……..

“It matters not one jot whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, it was a means to an end.”

“So a fine patriotic man like yourself would have had no qualms about point-blank execution of those same civilians, women and children too, to bring an end to the war? Or is it different when you do it from the air with bombs and the ugly details are not in your face?”

Two extreme views. The middle ground – of course it matters whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, but choices are often made not between a perfect idealistic situation and one which is clearly immoral but between the lesser of two evils or bad situations.

I think Pete’s high and mighty sarcasm and posturing is misplaced. Would he have been one of those who would have rushed to the Japanese mainland to be slaughtered by a highly motivated national population if given the chance? Probably not. More likely would have soiled himself and hidden behind some woman’s skirt.

Answer the question, Richard. It is quite straightforward. You can potentially save 100,000 GIs by killing a large number of enemy non-combatants and you have to do it face to face. Do you pull the trigger or not? I see you chose not to answer and attacked me instead. Now who’s hiding. I smell a hypocrite.

A better solution would have been to demonstrate the power of nukes by dropping them in an area with few inhabitants and let the Japanese know what might come next.

Me? I would rather attack the mainland and take my chances than kill civilians. Fighting is for soldiers. If not, you can’t criticise any terrorist for striking at “soft” targets either.

Lord Monckton says the global temperature in the last ice age was 10-12 C colder than present temperature. He seems to base this on the Vostok ice core data from Antarctica. I doubt it represents global temperature because Antarctica is the coldest place on earth and it represents only 2.7% of earth’s surface area. The rest of the world is warmer. Sea surface temperature at mid-latitudes is 5-10 C. If it is true global temperature in the last ice age was 12 C colder than today, then the mid-latitude Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans would have been completely frozen. My Lord can walk from Japan to California on the frozen Pacific Ocean. But we know only the Greenland Sea and Labrador Sea were frozen in the last ice age.

The temperature reconstruction of C. R. Scotese is more reliable. It is based on paleoclimate data from different places around the world. It puts the global temperature in the last ice age at around 12 C. Temperature today is about 14.5 C. Is it surprising we are only 2.5 C warmer than the last ice age? Not at all because we are still in an ice age. That’s why we still have permanent polar ice in Antarctica, Greenland, Arctic Ocean and Southern Ocean. Moreover, 43% of all land is still covered with snow and ice during winter. This is almost the same land ice coverage in the last glacial period except it was all year-round.

We often hear the “tipping point” to unstoppable global warming. We are far from it. When the Polar Regions were ice-free, global temperature was 22-26 C. If such tipping points exist, we are closer to a glacial period tipping point. Perhaps the global cooling hype of 1970s was more sensible than today’s global warming hype.

A reading of 0.108 might stretch the cooling period to almost 19 years! (The average of the previous 15 months before the cooling trend began.) There’s really nothing between 0.1 and 0.2 that would lengthen the trend beyond the trivial 1 month.

In fact, it was the abnormally cold June 1996 that halted the back-trend.

Why does the calculated global average suddenly jump 0.3 deg in 2001? The AQUA satellite was launched, it had better equipment and it’s own propulsion so it can maintain a proper orbit. With a 1 deg per km temp variance all measurements were calculated per AQUA. Post AQUA launch the other satellites were corrected upwards 0.3 deg, but NOT the previous measurements. So in the data there’s a 0.3 deg shift up in 2001. Of course this gives the alarmists thier HuGE evidence on a pathetically small temp scale. Considering the equipment error of margin is at least 2 deg and that the measurements are an average of a non static globe with a range over 100 deg (-60 to +40)

The atom bombs I understand stopped the war. Brought it to an abrupt end which also brought an end to the further fighting and killing and misery and the atrocities committed by the Japanese. Bombs kill people indiscriminately. I’m sure the bombing of Pearl Harbour killed some civilians too.

Fortunately most of the deaths were sudden and swift. What you are advocating is killing a few numbers of civilians to save many deaths rather than a large number. The moral dilemma is the same. It may not have worked if the bombs had been dropped on the countryside killing a smaller number of peasants. I think it was touch and go as it was and also I believe they had only 2 bombs and the threat of further bombing was a bluff.

PS Your analogy with terrorists striking “soft” targets is incorrect. Their motives are different, not to end misery but to cause it. Moreover many terrorists because of their ideology think innocent civilians are not innocent and are legitimate targets and their ultimate goal is not to end war and have a just peace but to subjugate. So their end is not justified by any means and certainly not by mass murder and causing terror.

“Dr Strangelove” offends against the Eschenbach Rule by saying I had said the difference between ice ages and interglacials is 10-12 K. It may be that much at the poles, but they are subject to the polar amplification of temperature change (up or down) that arises from the advection of heat from the tropics to the poles via the baroclinic eddies that prevail in the extratropics. That makes the difference between the last ice age and the current interglacial about 6 K.

The Scotese graph to which “Dr Strangelove” refers is insufficiently well resolved to permit him to draw the conclusion he has drawn from it.

On the question of Hiroshima, I did not want to cause offense to anyone, and I do understand the reasons why the Allies (Britain, too, was part of the decision) decided to drop the two bombs. It is indeed possible that more lives were saved by the two bombs than were destroyed by them. That said, anyone who has studied the medical effects of the radioactive fallout from Hirosihma – or, for that matter, from Chernobyl – cannot, if he be human at all, regard the indiscriminate nuclear bombing of entire cities as anything other than atrocities.

But, as a moderator pointed out, my reference to Hiroshima as an atrocity was made in passing. The main point was that the cruel and childish exploitation of the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant Japanese by the unspeakable Cook et al. at “Skeptical” “Science” is an altogether unacceptable method of conducting scientific discourse. All the commenters here who hooted and hollered about my having made a single reference to Hiroshima while remaining silent about Cook’s daily exploitation of the fate of those who died should be ashamed of their lack of due perspective. “A false balance is abomination to the Lord,” as the Good Book says, “but a just weight is His delight” (Proverbs, XI:1).

But, as a moderator pointed out, my reference to Hiroshima as an atrocity was made in passing. The main point was that the cruel and childish exploitation of the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant Japanese by the unspeakable Cook et al. at “Skeptical” “Science” is an altogether unacceptable method of conducting scientific discourse.

People are responsible for the actions of their governments, and that includes the people of Hiroshima ca. 1940. No one here is disagreeing that the SkS graph is in bad taste and an exploitation of the suffering of the people that went through that, but calling it “one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare” is flat out not true.

Pete says:
April 6, 2014 at 9:32 pm
I’ll take a swing at your question.
yes i would. in a minute, probably more time than it took japanese military commanders to order the rape of nanking.
war inevitably results in the murder of noncombatants…if it isnt worth killin grandmothers pregnant women and babies, the dont go to war.
the japanese were responsible for the murder of a half million chinese civilians in nanking alone…they enslaved korean women to serve as “comfort women” to be gang raped by japanese soldiers.
and you have the energy to cry over hiroshima and nagasaki?
the japanese reaped what they had sown.
grow up,

I have a model. Take the ensemble and compare it to the actual record. From this comparison create the “we’ve been this wrong” factor and include it in your model. Call this the “Trenbreth’s Missing Heat” model.

The whole Hiroshima-Dresden-internment thread has very little to do with climate issues, but I’ll throw in my two bits and point people at California historian Kevin Starr.

His works on the Japanese-American WW2 internment noted that American Federal Government’s motivations for internment included a very large fear of having to interpose Federal troops to stop vigilante attacks on Japanese-Americans.

Vigilante attacks incited by a disgraceful hate campaign of the Hearst newspaper chain on the American West Coast.

On second thought, the “Warmista” insistence on using “Climate Denier” hate speech has a strong historical parallel with the misconduct of the WW2 era Hearst newspaper chain.

Nicolas you seem to live in a fantasy world of delusion. War is serious business and your silly comments about UN or League of Nations rules are laughable. “Necessity knows no law.”
Monckton’s comments were made in ignorance not malice, I believe, but all too many people
have forgotten the necessity and only remember their silly untested values made in the smug days of peace.

Have you in fact studied the medical radiological effects of bombing the two Japanese cities? I doubt it very much.

If so, explain please how those effects differ from the effects of systematic burning alive of German civilians by Bomber Command. By this slur, you have given up any right whatsoever to claim to reason from a position of morality.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the number of Japanese & Allied lives saved by the atomic bombings is an order of magnitude greater than what would have been the cost of life on both sides in invading the Home Islands.

I respect the military records of your father & grandfather. But you don’t deserve to own their decorations.

The list of later famous Americans, productive members of Western Civilization, who would have died in the invasion of Japan is long. The number of Japanese civilians who would have died & their descendants who would never have lived is even longer. Much longer.

Your ignorance & glib misuse of “atrocity” are atrocities. Clearly you, unlike your esteemed forebears, have never been in a war.

Lord Monckton
Where did you get 6 K? It’s not on Scotese graph and not on Vostok data. That would still freeze the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans above 50 degrees latitude. Less than 5 K is more likely. This is in mid-latitudes. In the tropics it will be lower still. Since the tropics account for 40% of earth’s surface area, the global average will be 2.5-3.5 K.

[Snip. This thread is not for the purpose of re-fighting the war. Please stay on point: global warming has stopped for 17+ years. That goes for everyone. Thanks. ~ mod.]
—————————

I appreciate Christopher Monckton’s regular updates on the lack of warming since the late 1990s, & all else he has done to promote genuine climatological science.

But IMO he does grievous harm to his case by bandying such calumny inappropriately, & even more so if he really believes that America’s actions to end the war were atrocities, which stopped the atrocities of Imperial Japan, which cost millions of innocent Asian civilians their lives, liberty & property.

I exist today because my father did not have to land on what would have been the hell on earth of Kyushu beaches, had he even made it that far, through the hell on sea that would have been the East China Sea approaches to those beaches. Untold numbers of Japanese similarly live now or have enjoyed life who otherwise would have been destroyed in hellish war or starved to death without the air attacks that showed the Emperor & his even more unwilling to surrender military leaders that resistance was useless.

When you have charged a heavily defended & fortified beach, then you have a right to judge, Christopher Monckton.

OK, I’m still off topic. You were right, Moderator to snip my name calling. But this site is devoted to science. “Atrocity” is an much a semantic transgression as the “Hiroshima” equivalents of the CAGW crowd. Requiring linguistic precision is IMHO on topic. Snip if you must, sir.

More than ten times those lost were probably saved: up to 400,000 killed by the atomic bombs vs. ten million or more Japanese, American and Allied dead in an invasion (see below). Many Japanese would have starved to death without being near the fighting. The regime’s motto was “100 million dying together for the Emperor!” (Never mind that there were only about 72 million people in Japan in 1945.)

Frank, in “Downfall”, reports that a study done by physicist William Shockley, later co-inventor of the transistor, for Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s staff estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. Shockley’s key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan, which was justified, since people were being encouraged to attack GIs with sharpened bamboo spears. The military was reluctant to surrender even after the bombings.

[Reply: You’ve had your say, and it is posted here. Lord M wrote: On the question of Hiroshima, I did not want to cause offense to anyone… That should end the matter. Now, can we get back to ‘no global warming for 17 years’? Thanks. ~mod.]

The earth’s total surface area is pretty small when viewed from deep space and pretty big if you have to hike and swim its circumference. It’s all about perspective.
P.S. I hid the decline like they asked. I obviously didn’t hide it well enough. Nature appears to be using it.